Geraldine McCaughrean
Geraldine McCaughrean (pronounced "Muh-cork-run")[1] (born 6 June 1951) is a British children's novelist.
The youngest of three children, McCaughrean studied teaching but did not like it, and found her true vocation in writing. She claims that what makes her love writing is the desire to escape from an unsatisfactory world. Her motto is: do not write about what you know, write about what you want to know.
[edit] Literary career
McCaughrean has written more than 150 books, and won numerous prizes, including:
- The Carnegie Medal in 1988 and the Guardian Prize in 1989 for A Pack of Lies
- The first Blue Peter Book of the Year in 2000 for A Pilgrim's Progress
- The Whitbread Children's Book Award in 1987 for A Little Lower Than the Angels
- The Whitbread Children's Book Award in 1994 for Gold Dust
- The Whitbread Children's Book Award in 2004 for Not the End of the World
- The Michael L. Printz Award in 2008 for The White Darkness
In being short-listed for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2011 with The Death Defying Pepper Roux, McCaughrean became the first author to have had six titles short-listed, with at least one during each of the last four decades.
McCaughrean has also won awards for her writing in Germany and America, and has been translated into 42 languages worldwide. Her work includes many retellings for children: The Odyssey, El Cid, The Canterbury Tales, A Pilgrims Progress, Moby Dick, One Thousand and One Arabian Nights and Gilgamesh. In 2005, she was selected by Great Ormond Street Hospital to write an official sequel to J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, titled Peter Pan in Scarlet.[2]
McCaughrean was elected an Honorary Fellow of Canterbury Christ Church University, in 2006. She was elected a Fellow of the English Association in 2010 She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010.[3]
She has written six historical novels for adults and many children's fiction books, including The Kite Rider, The Stones Are Hatching, and Plundering Paradise.
[edit] References
- ^ "Geraldine McCaughrean" in Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, entry updated 4/15/2004.
- ^ BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Scarlet name for Peter Pan sequel
- ^ "Royal Society of Literature All Fellows". Royal Society of Literature. http://www.rslit.org/content/fellows. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
[edit] External links
- Official website of Geraldine McCaughrean
- "Neverland regained": a review in the TLS by Mick Imlah, 25 October 2006
- Geraldine McCaughrean at Contemporary Writers
